There's been a lot of talk about the OLPC's cute little mesh networking laptop at Linux.conf.au this week. The foundation is taking its low-cost, robust laptop the XO to underprivileged kids around the world, but it's also funding its work by selling XO laptops to the public. The cool news from the LCA conference was that a local OLPC group is setting up in Australia to help get computers to kids across Australia.

I have spent the past four days on a short vacation in the Piedmont area of northwest Italy (beautiful landscape, wonderful people and excellent food!). This has given me the opportunity to make a "traveling test" of Linux on both of my laptops. During this trip I have tried Ubuntu, Kubuntu (Ubuntu with the KDE desktop), and Mandriva, and all three have performed extremely well.

The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver. In short, a backup program. I’ve been following Amanda for a couple of years, and started using it intensively last January. I’ve been extremely happy with my decision to implement Amanda, so I decided to list some of the reasons.

Novell's GNU/Linux distribution on H-P laptops falls short (compared to other GNU/Linux laptops)

LinuX-Gamers Live is a live DVD from Germany based on Arch Linux that includes nothing but games. Version 0.9.3 was released in June and provides an excellent means of sampling Linux games or setting up a home arcade, although a few of the games wouldn't run on my machine.

One of the major disadvantages of Linux is that it won’t let you play most Windows games. On the other hand, lots of great free Linux games have been developed over the last couple of years. Here’s a list of some entertaining Linux games I’ve come across so far.

Bordeaux 1.2 was released today and its a major upgrade over the initial 1.0 release, version 1.2 comes with Office 2007 support, better IE support and cellar support.

In this episode: an overview of a few games for adults and kids alike that work great in Linux:

For the past week to two weeks I’ve done something I had’t done in years - I switched my default desktop environment in my GDM login screen. I’ve been logging into Xfce instead of my usual Gnome. There are basically three reasons why I’m loving Xfce over Gnome.